How to Manage Time – Three Tips

How to Manage Time / Tips to Manage time better / Higher Productivity in Shorter time span.
During the last two decades of my experience with successful professionals, one thing where I have seen most of them struggling is time management. In most of my coaching sessions I always face this question – I am never able to finish my work in time, I am always required to overstretch. In most of the cases whatever I have seen people planning to do at the start of a workday, they are not able to finish even half of that by evening and that too after overstretching for 2-3 hours beyond the regular time. This also leads to lot of stress and creates a severe work-life imbalance.

How do we address this issues?

Here are my 3 simple tips for all of you who are struggling with this issue day in and day out and not able to find a solution. These tips are extremely practical and have given phenomenal results in our experiments with more than 100 successful corporate professionals.

Tip 1 – Stop managing time.

It is impossible to manage time as it can’t be managed. Rather focus on managing “Attention”. If you are able to manage your attention, you will be able to achieve much more during your workday. We lose maximum time because we keep diverting our attention from one thing to another and as a result compromise on output.

Tip 2 – Don’t multitask.

Human brain cannot multitask. Do one think at a time and do it continuously for at least half an hour. No disruptions. Try it, results would be magical.

Tip 3 – Manage habits.

Map your whole workday and check for recurring habits. Tea/Coffee/Smoke breaks, urge to pick up the phone, being on social media/internet, chit-chat with colleagues, etc. This would throw some interesting insights into your behaviour patterns or habits. Managing them or in other words disciplining yourself will free up lot of time – it may even surprise you.

Conclusion: Try these three simple tips and you will realise how much difference they can make to your life.
Also check out my post on How to start as an Entreprenuer here.

Don’t forget to share your experiences with me.